Cast

visit the film locations

The Black Friar, 174 Queen Victoria Street, EC4 (tel: 020.7236.5474) (tube: Blackfriars, Circle and District Lines) Built in 1875 on the site of the Dominican priory that gave the area its name, what makes the pub such a treasure is that, in 1902, the pub was given a makeover that is, frankly, high camp. The gilt and marble interior is overlaid with bronze art nouveau friezes depicting piously industrious monks. Take note that the City becomes a ghost town at weekends and few, if any, pubs open.

The Linley Sambourne House, 18 Stafford Terrace, just off High Street Kensington, W8 (tube: High Street Kensington, District and Circle Lines). A perfectly preserved Victorian townhouse built in 1874, with its original furniture and fittings intact. Once home of cartoonist Edward Linley Sambourne, its now owned and maintained by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. The house was closed for major renovation work in 1999 but reopened in April 2003.

Flushed with the success of A Room With a View, the Merchant-Ivory team turned another EM Forster book, the posthumously published gay novel Maurice, into a lush Mills and Boon romancer.

The Cambridge scenes were actually filmed at Forster’s old University. Exterior shots are of Trinity College, Cambridge, at the Quad and under the Wren Library. The Gothic William IV Porter’s Lodge can be seen at King’s College, where the Latin grace was also filmed, in the Dining Hall.

The punt trip is on the River Cam at Clare Bridge, and the romantic scene between Maurice Hall (James Wilby) and Clive Durham (Hugh Grant) in the field is near Ely in Cambridgeshire.

Clive’s country house, where Maurice attracts the attention of groundsman Alec Scudder (Rupert Graves), is Wilbury Park, Newton Toney, a private house owned by actress Maria St Juste, on the A338 halfway between Andover and Salisbury, Wiltshire.

The boathouse in the grounds where they meet up is, however, in the grounds of Crichel in Dorset.

In London, Maurice bumps into his old schoolmaster (Simon Callow) by the Assyrian statues in the British Museum, Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, WC1 (tube: Tottenham Court Road; Northern and Central Lines).

The marvellous art-nouveau drinking den, where Maurice and Clive’s aristocratic pal Lord Risley runs into problems when he tries to indulge his taste for the military, is the Black Friar, 174 Queen Victoria Street, EC4, just across the road from Blackfriars railway station.

The Black Friar is a real gem. Sitting on a small triangular plot at the northern end of Blackfriars Bridge, it's a Victorian pub, built on the site of the Dominican Priory which gave its name to the area. The interior is a delirious fantasy of coloured marble, with copper bas-reliefs of industrious monks, admonishing the drinkers with stern little homilies: "Finery is foolery", "Haste is slow". It can get a bit crowded with the after-office crowd: best to visit on a quiet afternoon, or check out its unique architecture.

The family meal, before Clive sets off for the Continent, is in the extravagantly gilt Grill Room of the Café Royal, 68 Regent Street, W1. Opened in 1865, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw dined here. It’s where Jack Hawkins assembles his crew in the 1960 caper The League of Gentlemen, and where Rupert Graves celebrates his new post in Louis Malle’s 1992 melodrama Damage. The Café Royal closed down in 2008 and has been converted into a luxury hotel.

Clive’s European travels take him to a 'Grecian' amphitheatre, actually at Segesta, near Castellammare in northwest Sicily.

While Clive settles for conventional married life, there’s a happy, if unlikely, ending for Maurice. The docks, where he just manages to reach Scudder before he emigrates, are the historic Gloucester Docks, Gloucester on the Severn.